LIBERTY: Schoolgirl hero ‘acted on common sense’

Friday, May 25, 2007

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/
national/schoolgirl-hero-acted-on-common-
sense/2007/03/31/1174761806572.html

http://tinyurl.com/2jbeuw

Schoolgirl hero ‘acted on common sense’
March 31, 2007

***Begin Quote***

Laura, who was returning to her Longreach home from St Margaret’s Anglican Girls School in Brisbane, managed to revive the driver, who lifted his foot off the accelerator and pulled the bus to a halt.

If the bus had failed to stop, it could have ended up in a river.

Laura then found a torch and evacuated the passengers from the bus before ringing an ambulance and coach operators, Greyhound.

Roma police will nominate Laura, who does not yet have her driver’s licence, for a bravery award, but she says she was just following common sense.

Roma police Inspector Graham Coleman yesterday described Laura’s actions as heroic, saying: “She’s obviously saved injury, if not the lives of people on the bus.”

***End Quote***

And, excatly why do we, they, anyone have “driver’s licenses”?

Good people can do it fine without the Gooferment’s involvement.

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Posted by reinkefj

TECHNOLOGY: Skype on a free blog

Friday, May 25, 2007

*** begin quote ***

Would like to know how you set up the Skype thing?

*** end quote ***

Sure, no problem. It’s straight forward one you get the concept.

By way of background, I like tinyurl, and others like it. It makes ANY stuff, like your email address, into a url. Spammers can NOT harvest your email, because it’s an URL and doesn’t look like an email.

Neat concept.

Skype is another neat concept. Free phone calls. Verizon’s worst nightmare. So, I wanted the kool balloons on my blog. The fact that I’d be the first to get them made it kooler.

With the free, and unequaled, wordpressdotcom in addition to not having javascript, it prunes a lot of stuff out of the things you can put on there. When it would NOT go on, I asked about Skype. And they put it on their queue. (I’d like to have some visibility into THAT queue!) Hey for free, I wouldn’t listen to any whines.

I just kept poking around with Skype, and the errors that I could cause the free, and unequaled, wordpressdotcom, and eventually made the connection. The free, and unequaled, wordpressdotcom says “http good; all else bad”. So I wondered how to make Skype into http.

First, I went to the Skype site for a url that I could use. They had nothing but those kool balloons I wanted.

Second, I gave up in disgust.

Then, when I was putting an email into an url for display on the blog, it hit me. Transform the Skype command into a url.

Sure enough, I was able to use tiny url to turn the skype commands, that are unacceptable to the free wordpressdotcom, into valid urls. I put those URLs in a blogroll called skype. Played with the labels to make the display pretty. Had some people test it. It works. If you have skype installed. If you don’t you get an ugly error.

Neat. Not as kool as the balloons. But still better than naught. I told the nice support fellow from the free, and unequaled, wordpressdotcom about my trick and he was impressed. That made an ITSJ’s day complete.

FWIW

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Posted by reinkefj

PRODUCTIVITY: Keep a medical log book

Friday, May 25, 2007

In dealing with Frau Reinke’s medical problems, I wish I had kept a log book of all that went on. A school child’s “marble” book would have been all that was necessary to capture the information, events, dates, places, docs, and “stuff” that would be invaluable in retrospect.

Argh!

A moleskin pocket book and the discipline to keep annotating it would be a great asset.

You could use it as a source to transcribe into a “blog like” file. It’d be useful to keep all the experts honest and one’s own thoughts straight.

May it could be a private blog? Surely the technology is there for it.

Wish I have done it.

Maybe you can learn form my mistake?

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Posted by reinkefj

RANT:Stupidity ruins a good idea and no feedback loop

Friday, May 25, 2007

Walgreens has a neat idea, that we didn’t have at our last gooferment approved drug pusher (what do you call a drug store?), called “auto mated refills”.

(The only car involved is when one of us drives to get them. And, since they are for my mate Frau Reinke I guess they are sort of aptly named.)

So Walgreens automated refills identifies the RXes (The gooferment permitted forms with the approvals of the gooferment agent called doctor Argh!) that she uses regularly. And each month, refills it.

Great.

BUT!

Since we didn’t give them the RXes on the same day, they (all 13) renew on different days. Further, over time, new medicines were added, dosages changed, and some medicines stopped. It’s messy. But I have captured all that info for her in a one page document with all the current RXes, dosages, and who/when changed it. (For our own sanity.)

There is NO way to align Walgreens with reality and NO way to have them all renew on the same day.

Argh!

It’s annoying enough to have gooferment rules about paperwork and approvals. Add in the annoyance of the gooferment’s financing agents (What do you call medical insurance companies?). Add in the annoyance of complying with the gooferment’s tax diktats about FSAs.

But the crowning annoyance is that Walgreens has no feedback loop. No way for the patient to put information and suggestions back into them to get them to improve their service.

So a good idea (i.e., automated refills) has some stupidity built in (i.e., different renewal dates) (i.e., no way to correct the data they have on file) but the ranting comes in when there is no feedback loop.

Argh! Argh!

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Posted by reinkefj